Thirst for Love Page 8

The blandishments Yakichi would waft before the senses of the minister might have been packaged under the name “Rest and Seclusion,” so seductively would they draw him away from fame and fortune. What would they profit Yakichi? They would give social value to his seclusion, foster overestimation of the sharpness of the talons this world-sick old hawk held concealed.

  Mornings, drink the dew from the magnolias;

  Evenings, eat the petals dropped from the chrysanthemums.

  It was Yakichi’s favorite quotation from the Chinese classic the Li Sao, written in his own calligraphy and hung in a frame on the wall of the reception room. To a parvenu, developing a hobby like this is a considerable achievement. Since only one personal eccentricity was enough to mature his taste for hobbies, this tenant-farmer penchant for calligraphy had evidently put a brake on Yakichi’s ambitions. People who are well born, however, seldom steep themselves thus in elegance.

  Until well into the afternoon the household was very busy. Yakichi said over and over that an extravagant reception was not necessary. All understood, however, that if they took him at his word he would be very upset. Only Kensuke quietly skulked on the second floor, avoiding the work. Etsuko and Chieko deftly arranged the Autumnal Equinox rice cakes in matching lacquered boxes. They made whatever preparations they could in the event their guests stayed for the evening meal, going so far as to include portions for a secretary and a chauffeur. Mrs. Okura was called to strangle the chicken. When she started for the chicken coop in her house dress, Asako’s children both ran along, curious as to what was happening.

  “Now, don’t be naughty! Haven’t I always told you that you shouldn’t watch chickens being strangled?” their mother called from the house. Asako couldn’t cook or sew, yet she thought herself liberally endowed with the faculty of bringing up children in the petit-bourgeois tradition. She had flown into a passion, for instance, when Nobuko came in with a cheap comic book borrowed from the Okuras’ daughter. She took it away and substituted for it a picture book for learning English. Nobuko smeared the Queen’s face with blue pastel paints to get back at her mother.

  As she took from the cupboard the Shunkei lacquered trays and wiped them one by one, Etsuko quivered in expectation of the screams of the chicken being strangled. She would cloud a spot with her breath, then wipe. The amber lacquer would cloud over and then clear and reflect her face. Amid these uneasy repetitions, Etsuko sketched in her mind the scene at the shed in which the chicken was being killed.

  The shed gave off the kitchen door. Dangling a chicken, the bandy-legged Mrs. Okura entered. The interior was half lighted by the rays of the afternoon sun. As a result, the darker areas seemed even darker. Dull, dim outlines reflected from wrought-iron surfaces suggested the presence of mattocks and spades propped in back. Two or three weathered storm shutters leaned against the wall. There was a straw basket for carrying earth. There was a sprayer for fogging magnesium sulfate over the persimmon trees. The wife sat down in a small lopsided chair and scissored the wings of the struggling bird tightly between her thick, gnarled knees. Then, for the first time, she noticed the two children standing in the door of the shed watching her every movement, her every exertion.

  “Naughty! Young lady, you’re going to catch it from your mother. Now go right away from there. This isn’t something children should be watching.”

  The chicken squawked; the chickens in the henhouse heard and squawked too.

  Nobuko and little Natsuo, holding his sister’s hand, with only their eyes gleaming in the shadow thrown by the light at their backs, stood and watched barely breathing as Mrs. Okura bent over the struggling chicken, writhing its whole body in the effort to free its wings. She perfunctorily reached forth both her hands toward the neck . . .

  After a time Etsuko heard the chicken’s screech—tentative, yet committed; full of frustration, bewilderment, and terror.

  It was just four o’clock. Yakichi had managed to hide his exasperation that his guest had not yet arrived; he had even managed to act as if he were not quite worn out with waiting. As the shadows darkened under the kaede trees in the garden, however, he began to assume an undisguised expression of uneasiness. He went into a wild fit of smoking and then suddenly headed out to work in the pear orchard.

  Etsuko attempted to help him by going out to where the highway ended at the cemetery gate to watch for a limousine destined for the Sugimoto home. She leaned against the girders of the bridge and looked far out on the distant gentle curve of the road. As she looked from this point beyond which the highway was unpaved and in fact unfinished, and watched the road twist as far as the eye could see—among rich ricefields almost ready for harvesting, cornfields with their straight rows, forests grounded in tiny swamps, the Hankyu electric line, village streets, creeks—Etsuko felt herself grow dizzy. To imagine that a limousine was going to negotiate this road to Etsuko’s feet went beyond dreaming; it seemed to verge on the miraculous. According to the children, two or three cars had stopped here about noon. Now, however, there was no sign of them.

  Of course, today is the Equinox! But what have we been doing? All the bean-jam rice cakes we’ve been making since morning, and packing them away in nested boxes in the cupboard so the children wouldn’t find them and ruin them! We were so busy that not one of us thought of it. I did pray once in front of the ancestral tablets. But otherwise we only burned incense, as we do every day. All day we spent our time grieving about the arrival of living guests, and all of us forgot completely about the dead.

  She watched a family troop noisily out of the gate of the Hattori Garden of Souls—an ordinary middle-aged couple and four children, one of them a girl in student dress. The children had trouble staying with the group; they constantly lagged, then ran ahead. Etsuko noticed they were playing a game, catching grasshoppers in the grass circle enclosed by the drive in which cars turned around. The winner was the one who caught the most grasshoppers without stepping on the grass. The lawn slowly darkened. The graves that lay far beyond the entrance and the thick stands of bushes and trees gradually filled with darkness, like cotton soaking up water. Only the cemetery area on the farthest slope was bright with the setting sun; the gravestones and the evergreen shrubs there shone red. The slope seemed like a face lighted by quiet rays.

  Etsuko looked scornfully at the middle-aged parents, walking along talking and smiling, oblivious to the children. In her romantic way of looking at things, husbands were always unfaithful, wives always suffered; middle-aged couples all ended up not speaking to each other for one of two reasons: either they were sick of one another or hated each other. This gentleman in stylish striped sport coat and slacks, however, and his wife in her lavender suit carrying a shopping bag out of which a thermos bottle protruded seemed to be utter strangers to the romantic tale. They seemed to belong to that class that turns the romances of our world into topics for afterdinner conversation and forgets about them.

  When they got as far as the bridge, the couple called their children. As they did so, they looked uneasily up and down the road otherwise devoid of humanity. Finally, the gentleman approached Etsuko and asked politely: “I wonder if you can tell me where we turn off this road to get to the Okamachi station of the Hankyu line.”

  As Etsuko told them about the shortcut through the ricefields and the government housing, the parents gaped in amazement at her precise Tokyo Yamate speech. The four children soon crowded about and looked up at Etsuko. A boy, about seven, quietly extended his closed fist before her. Then he relaxed his fingers just a little and said: “Look!”

  In the cage made by his little fingers the bent light-green body of a grasshopper was visible. In the shadow of the fingers the insect slowly extended and retracted its legs.

  The oldest girl smartly slapped the boy’s hand from below. He released the grasshopper, which flew clear, hopped twice on the ground, and plunged into the bushes on the side of the road and disappeared.

  A brother-sister quarrel ensued, quelled by laughing parents.
All nodded respectfully to Etsuko; then they took up their leisurely procession again, and stepped onto the grassy path between the ricefields.

  Etsuko suddenly wondered whether the automobile so long awaited by the Sugimoto family had come up. She turned and looked up the highway, but again, as far as she could see, no car was visible. Shadows were accumulating gradually on the road surface; it was twilight.

  It was bedtime, and the guests had not arrived. The household was beaten down by a heavy, oppressive mood; yet, taking their lead from the silent, irritable Yakichi, they had no choice save to act as if the visit would still take place.

  Since Etsuko had come, nothing had brought the family together in anticipation comparable to this. Yakichi didn’t say a word about the Equinox—he seemed to have forgotten it. He waited. Then he went on waiting. He was torn alternately by hope and disappointment. His demeanor was like that of Etsuko waiting for her husband to come home—hopeless and abandoned.

  “He’s still coming; it will work out”—it is horrible to say these words. After you say them it seems to you that, really, no one is coming.

  Even Etsuko, who knew how Yakichi felt, could not believe that the hopes he had been filled with all day were simply hopes for worldly advancement. We are not wounded so deeply when betrayed by the things we hope for as when betrayed by things we try our best to despise. In such betrayal comes the dagger in the back.

  Yakichi was sorry that he had shown the telegram to the union executive. Thanks to this he had given those people the opportunity to pin on him the label of a man cast aside. The executive insisted that he wanted to take just one quick look at the minister’s face, and he hung around the Sugimoto home until about eight p.m., diligently helping wherever he could. Thus he saw everything: Yakichi’s concern, Kensuke’s half-teasing verbal digs, the whole family’s preparations for a concerted welcome, the approaching night, the misgivings, the first definite signs of waning hope.

  As for Etsuko, the events of this day taught her the lesson that it never pays to anticipate anything. At the same time she experienced, in response to Yakichi’s painful efforts not to be wounded by this betrayal of his hopes, a strange stirring of affection that she had not known before in the time she had been in Maidemmura. The telegram might well have been dashed off by one of Yakichi’s many cronies in the Osaka area as a practical joke dreamed up at some drunken party.

  Etsuko treated Yakichi with unobtrusive gentleness, quietly intimate, mindful of his sensitivity to anything like sympathy.

  After ten, Yakichi, his spirits crushed, for the first time thought about Ryosuke with a humiliating feeling of fear. A sense of sin that he had never once in his life entertained now lightly touched a corner of his heart. This sense grew heavier; it imparted a bittersweet taste to his tongue; it seemed to him a feeling that could grow upon one, cajoling the heart as one pondered it. The evidence for it was Etsuko, who this evening seemed more beautiful than ever.

  “We bustled the Equinox away, didn’t we? How would you like to go with me to the cemetery in Tokyo tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Would you take me?” said Etsuko, her voice filled with something like joy. After a moment she went on: “Father, don’t be concerned about Ryosuke. Even when he was living, he wasn’t mine.”

  Two rain-filled days followed. The third day, September twenty-sixth, was fair. Everyone was busy from early morning with the laundry that had piled up.

  As Etsuko hung up Yakichi’s heavily darned socks to dry (he probably would be upset if Etsuko bought him new socks), she suddenly began to wonder what Saburo had done with the socks she had given him. This morning she had noticed that he was still wearing his torn sneakers over bare feet. That was when he said, with a smile that seemed to have grown in intimacy: “Ma’am, good morning.” A small sore that might have been made by a grass cut peeped through a hole in the canvas over his grimy ankle.

  I suppose he plans to wear them when he goes out. They weren’t expensive at all, but that’s the way a country boy would look at them.

  Nevertheless, she had no way of asking him why he wasn’t wearing them.

  Lines had been stretched between the limbs of the four great pasania trees by the kitchen, and wash now took up every inch of the linen cords that webbed the trees together. The west wind blowing out of the chestnut forest made it flap and flutter. Maggie, tied beneath the lines, kept running back and forth under the white shapes sportively flapping over her head and every once in a while let out a prolonged howl. When the wash was hung, Etsuko walked around between the lines. As she did so a sudden gust of wind caught a still-wet apron and snapped it forcefully against her face. It was a refreshing slap that set her cheek glowing.

  Where was Saburo? When she closed her eyes, the wounded, dirty ankle she had seen this morning floated before her. His smallest quirk, his smile, his poverty, the disrepair of his clothing—all of them struck her. His lovely poverty! That above all drew her. In Etsuko’s eyes his poverty played the fetching role usually portrayed by shyness in a girl. “Maybe he is in his room, quietly absorbed in a samurai tale.”

  Etsuko crossed the kitchen, drying her hands on her apron. Beside the back door stood a waste container. It was a large can into which Miyo threw uneaten fish and discarded vegetables. When it was full, she would throw it in the trench where they made compost.

  Something in the can caught Etsuko’s eye; she stopped beside it. Out from under the yellowed vegetables and the fishbones a piece of brand-new fabric shone. It was a blue color she had seen before. She gingerly plunged in her fingers and pulled out the cloth. It was the socks. Under the blue pair, the brown pair came to light. She judged by their shape that they had not even been tried on. The price tag of the department store still hung to them by its staple.

  She stood idly for a moment face-to-face with this perplexing discovery. The socks fell from her fingers and draped themselves over the fishy garbage. After two or three minutes, she looked around her, and then, as a mother might bury a fetus, she quickly buried the two pairs of socks under the yellowed greens and the fishbones. She washed her hands. As she washed them, and as she carefully dried them again on her apron, she went on pondering. It was not easy for her to get her thoughts in order. Before she succeeded in doing so, an unreasoning anger came over her and determined how she would act.

  Saburo was in his three-mat room, changing into his work clothes. When he saw Etsuko appear between himself and the bay window, he dropped to a polite sitting posture and resumed buttoning his shirt. His sleeves were still unbuttoned. He glanced quickly at Etsuko’s face. She still had not said a word. He buttoned his sleeves and sat silent. Saburo was struck by her expression, which had not changed in the slightest degree.

  “What about the socks I gave you the other day? Would you show them to me?”

  Etsuko said this gently, but someone hearing it could catch in the softness an unnecessarily menacing note. She was angry. It was an anger whose reasons were inexplicable, born by chance in some corner of her emotions; Etsuko blew it up, amplified it. If she had not, she couldn’t have asked the questions she had in mind; her anger was born from the demands of the moment, a truly abstract emotion.

  There was a movement in Saburo’s black puppy’s eyes. He unbuttoned his left sleeve and buttoned it again. Now it was his turn to be silent.

  “What’s the matter? Why don’t you answer?”

  She leaned her arm against the railing of the window. Then she looked mockingly at Saburo. Even in her anger, she savored this joy moment after moment. What a thing it was! Until now she had never imagined this. Indulging herself with this proudly victorious feeling. Observing this tanned, downward-inclined neck, this refreshingly shaven beard. Etsuko was not aware that her words were charged with caressing tones.

  “It’s all right. Don’t be so crestfallen. I saw them, that’s all—thrown away in the garbage can. Did you throw them there?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Saburo answered without hesit
ation. His answer unsettled Etsuko.

  He’s protecting someone, she thought. If not he would have hesitated just a little.

  Suddenly Etsuko heard the sound of sobbing behind her. It was Miyo, crying into the skirt of an old gray serge apron far too long for her. Out of her sobs haltingly came the words: “I threw them away. I threw them away.”

  “What are you saying? What are you crying about?” As Etsuko pronounced these words, she glanced at Saburo’s face. His eyes were filled with anxiety, with the wish to communicate with Miyo, in reaction to which Etsuko tore the apron from the girl’s face with a brusqueness verging on cruelty.

  Miyo’s frightened, beet-red face was revealed. It was an ordinary country-girl face. There was something ugly about her tear-stained features: her cheeks like ripe persimmons, swollen and red, looking as if they would bruise if pressed; her thin eyebrows; her large, stolid, unexpressive eyes; her impossible nose. Only her lips unsettled Etsuko slightly. Etsuko’s lips were rather thin. Quivering with sobs, wet and shining with tears and saliva, these lips had just the right degree of roundness, like a pretty red pincushion.

  “Well, why? I’m not particularly worried about the socks being thrown away. I just don’t understand—that’s why I’m asking.”

  “Yes, ma’am—”

  Saburo interrupted her. His glib speech made his normal self look like fraud: “Actually, it was I who threw them away, ma’am. They seemed much too fine for me to wear, so I threw them away, ma’am.”

  “Don’t say such silly things; it won’t work,” said Etsuko. Miyo feared that Saburo’s actions would be reported to Yakichi, who would then certainly punish him. She could not allow him to protect her as he had been doing any longer. So she went on before Saburo could say any more: “I threw them away, ma’am. Right after you gave them to Saburo, he showed them to me. I was awfully suspicious and said you didn’t give them to him for nothing. Then he got mad and said, ‘All right, you keep them,’ and stalked off leaving them behind. Then I threw them away—women can’t wear men’s socks, after all.”